Author Tod Goldberg’s “Gangster Nation” is the second in a series of comedic thrillers featuring Sal Cupertine, a Chicago mob hitman who goes underground in Las Vegas as Rabbi David Cohen. Photo by Linda Woods

“Gangster Nation” is the second book in Tod Goldberg’s series of comedic thrillers about Sal Cupertine, a hitman for the Chicago mob, who goes underground in the new identity of Rabbi David Cohen in Las Vegas.

Like a gambler up to his neck in debt to a loan shark, Tod Goldberg had a problem that wasn’t going away.

He’d agreed to write a short crime story for a compilation called “Las Vegas Noir,” but his past life in the Vegas suburb of Summerlin felt like the opposite of noir, and his deadline was fast approaching.

“I was here in the desert in Palm Springs, stopped at a stop light, pondering my existential fate, and how I was probably going to have to give the money back from the short story,” Goldberg says. “And I turned and I saw someone walking out of this very old cemetery, closing the door behind them.”

And he thought: “Who goes in there? I mean, they’re not putting fresh bodies in there,” Goldberg says. “And since I’m fairly criminal-minded I thought, ‘You know, if you really wanted to get away with murder the thing to do would be to own a cemetery and bury the bodies in coffins.'”

By the time the light changed he had the seed of an idea and a solution to his problem. “All of a sudden, just out of the ether – ether plus anxiety – I had this idea of a hit man who is pretending to be a Jew, running a cemetery and a synagogue for a temple in Las Vegas,” Goldberg says.

And not just for that short story, but in time for a series of books, including the latest, “Gangster Nation,” which arrives on Tuesday, Sept. 12, the second in what will be a trilogy if not more in the saga of Chicago hit man Sal Cupertine turned Vegas rabbi David Cohen. In the new book, Cupertine-Cohen is planning his escape from both his past and present, hoping to be reunited with his wife and son for a fresh start far from anyone that’s ever known him, but as the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 occur, his world and the world at large are turned upside down, his life and future thrown into jeopardy.

It’s a thriller that walks a neat path from funny to frightening, its characters motivated by the overlapping codes of criminality and religion.

“The idea of the Godfather and then the God Father is an easy line to draw,” Goldberg says. “When you read a lot of the religious texts, the Talmud, the Torah, the Midrash, all of that, you see a lot about vengeance, you see a lot about families, you see a lot about what it means to be pursued.”

Just as Jews built structures to keep themselves safe from those who would harm them, so too has organized crime created codes, written or not, to keep those who would target them at bay, says Goldberg, who also preaches what he practices, directing the Low Residency masters program for creative writing at the University of California, Riverside.

“There’s an amazing line in the Talmud,” he says, going on to describe how in a book of quotations from that Jewish holy book that had belonged to his grandfather, who fled persecution in Ukraine as a boy in 1919, he stumbled onto it and liked it so much he used both in the current “Gangster Nation” and the first book in the series, “Gangsterland.”

“There was this one little circle that he’d circled and put a little mark next to it,” Goldberg says. “And the line is, ‘If a man comes to kill you, wake up early and kill him first.’

“So I thought a couple of thoughts when I saw that. No. 1, ‘What the (heck) was my grandfather doing in his spare time?'” He laughs, before continuing. “As a Talmudic observation, that’s a pretty dark one,” Goldberg says. “If you had said Al Capone (said it), you’d totally believe it. And so I think the juxtaposition of the Jewish faith and the Mafia stuff is pretty easy.”

While he was already well-versed in crime writing – “Gangster Nation” is book No.12 or 13, he says – working on the series has had the side benefit of better connecting him to the faith of his ancestry, Goldberg says.

“I’m a terrible Jew,” he says. “I’m a pork-eating, mayonnaise-on-corned-beef Jew. So I started to read all of the books this fake rabbi would read.”

And in doing so, it changed the way he viewed his life, deepening his knowledge of the long roots that spread from his life in present-day Palm Springs back to Ukraine and beyond that into the history of the Jewish people and faith.

“I enjoyed the kugel, I enjoyed the corned beef, I liked Neil Diamond, I liked the Beastie Boys but I didn’t have the weight of knowing the full history,” Goldberg says. “And once you have that, I think you have to approach things in a different light.”

Understanding what his grandfather’s family endured and survived – the pogroms of the early 1900s, the Holocaust that soon followed – gave him a greater appreciation for their struggle, and the struggle of the Jews throughout history, but also helped him see how his character’s transformation might unfold.

“The more you read, the more empathy you get in general,” Goldberg says. “The way it relates to the transformation of Sal to Rabbi Cohen is that for the first time he begins to understand the value of a human life more than he has in the past.”

Both “Gangsterland” and now “Gangster Nation” have fun with some of the tropes and traditions of both organized crime and Judaism, but Goldberg says the response from both communities has been positive. (Hollywood is interested too: In July it was optioned by the producers behind the Netflix gangster series “Peaky Blinders.”)

“The Jews love it, they absolutely love it,” he says. “It was picked up by countless synagogues across the country for their book groups, which is a great and total thrill for me.”

The best response, he says, came by accident, or perhaps coincidence, in the discovery of a YouTube video someone sent him of a rabbi in Summerlin, Nevada, who explained that not only did he lead a temple on Hillpointe Road – the setting Goldberg used as the model for his fictional synagogue – but he also shared the last name Cohen with Goldberg’s hit man-turned-rabbi.

“I saw the video and I thought, ‘Oh my god, I’m a dead man – this is when they come for me,'” he says, laughing. “But as it turned out Rabbi Cohen” – the real one – “is a wonderfully funny, charming and extraordinarily well-read man who loved the book.”

And while it’s probably a stretch to imagine mobbed-up wiseguys forming book groups and devouring “Gangsterland” or “Gangster Nation,” Goldberg says he heard more informally from sources in the world of crime that his books were enjoyed there too on a more informal basis.

After the first book, at a public event in Las Vegas one man approached his table, complimented Goldberg – “You really got the way we talk right,” the man said, adding that he “drove down to pay my respects” – and more or less freaked out the author.

“I gotta say, I don’t want to particularly be some place and have someone tell me I got something wrong and be mad about it,” Goldberg says. “But I feel like most of the time gangsters don’t show up to a Barnes & Noble.

Peter Larsen has been the Pop Culture Reporter for the Orange County Register since 2004, finally achieving the neat trick of getting paid to report and write about the stuff he's obsessed about pretty much all his life. He regularly covers the Oscars and the Emmys, goes to Comic-Con and Coachella, reviews pop music, and conducts interviews with authors and actors, musicians and directors, a little of this and a whole lot of that. He grew up, in order, in California, Arkansas, Kentucky and Oregon. Graduated from Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Ore. with degrees in English and Communications. Earned a master's degree at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. Earned his first newspaper paycheck at the Belleville (Ill.) News-Democrat, fled the Midwest for Los Angeles Daily News and finally ended up at the Orange County Register. He's taught one or two classes a semester in the journalism and mass communications department at Cal State Long Beach since 2006. Somehow managed to get a lovely lady to marry him, and with her have two daughters. And a dog named Buddy. Never forget the dog.

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